The present invention relates generally to the field of computing, and more particularly to social media networks.
In many social media networks, a particular user may perform actions that can be viewed by his social contacts. Some actions performed on the social media network may influence some of the user's social contacts and they may perform similar actions. As an action propagates, the influence increases and reaches a peak value and from there the influence starts declining and decays over time.
As an example, a first user may use a social media networking site relating to movies to perform the action of rating and/or reviewing a movie. This action may then be viewed by the first user's social contacts and some of them may be interested in performing similar actions (reviewing/rating the same movie). The first user may be said to have influenced actions performed by the first user's social contacts and such actions may further propagate to contacts of users' contacts.
During a time of a peak of influence of a particular action, if another user performs a similar action, the influence of the similar action will be undermined by the influence of the action that triggered it.
In such scenarios, timing of performance of an action by a user plays a significant role in propagating the influence.